City · Part 6 · About 8 minutes
Shaping the land
The ground under a city is not fixed. Coastlines can be pushed out or carved in, rivers rerouted, water added — and land reclaimed, on the one budget in the whole layer that is genuinely scarce.
The one-minute explanation
Part 1 established that population sets how far your city reaches, and terrain decides how much of that reach is usable ground. This part is where you change the second half.
The terrain tools sit apart from everything else in one important way: reclamation is capped, and the cap is a percentage of what nature gave you. Every other constraint in the city is an allowance handed down from the nation. This one is the city's own.
The coastline moves both ways
A coastline is a run of control points you can drag. Push a point seawards and you gain land — a wharf, a widened waterfront, a headland. Pull it landwards and you carve a bay into your own city.
That symmetry is the point. Editing the coast is not only a way to make room; it is how you give a waterfront a shape worth building along, which matters because the waterfront is usually where a city's best frontage is.
Rivers work the same way but with two independent banks — drag anchors on either side, insert points where you need finer control, remove the ones you do not. Widening a river and narrowing it downstream are the same gesture applied differently.
Water bodies are simpler: place one as you would a zone, then reshape and curve its edges. Unlike everything else you place, water consumes no development capacity at all — it is terrain, not development.
Reclamation is the one real budget
Reclamation places artificial islands into sea, river or water you made yourself. It is the only tool in the City Map with a hard quantitative limit:
Read “natural” precisely: the base is the land you were given, excluding anything already reclaimed. You cannot reclaim land and then reclaim a further 20% of that, so the budget does not compound and an archipelago city cannot bootstrap itself out of the sea.
Three distinct refusals tell you which wall you hit:
| What it says | What it means |
|---|---|
| Not enough water here | The spot you picked is not sufficiently open water to hold an island. |
| Exceeds the reclamation cap | You are over 20% — the change is undone rather than partially applied. |
| No water within this metro | An inland metro has nothing to reclaim from; the tool is unavailable rather than merely failing. |
The land HUD reports reclaimed area separately from natural land, so you can always see how much of the budget you have spent without hunting for it.
Names make a plan a place
Place names label the geography rather than the buildings: a bay, a river, a range. They come in the three styles described in Names, layers and exporting maps — and because the namespace is shared with the national map, a bay you name inside the city is named on the country map too. There is one geography, labelled once.
Markers are the other half. Thirty kinds cover the things a map should point at — landmarks, food, culture, museums, nature, transport of every sort, ports, warehouses, medical, education, scenic and protected areas — each with its own icon and colour, and each shown always, automatically by zoom, or hidden.
One marker kind does real work rather than decoration. An airport marker can be linked to a national airport code, and that link is what establishes the airport in the city: it ties the airside area you drew to the airport the nation knows about. One code per marker, and unlinked airfields stay unlinked — free expression rather than a claim.
What you cannot edit
Underneath your edits sits terrain the city derives rather than stores: elevation bands and vegetation. You cannot paint it, and that is deliberate — it is the same ground the national map generated, and it is what decides how much of your reach is buildable in the first place.
So the division is: nature gives the ground, you edit its edges. Coast, riverbank, added water and reclaimed islands are yours; hills and vegetation are not.
Practical habits
- Shape the coast before zoning the waterfront. Moving a coastline under finished districts is possible but wasteful; the shape is what makes the frontage worth having.
- Watch the budget line in the HUD. Reclaimed area is reported separately precisely so it can be tracked.
- Carve as well as fill. A bay pulled into the city creates far more valuable frontage than the same area of flat reclaimed ground.
- Name the geography early. It costs nothing, it is shared with the national map, and it is what makes a large city navigable in search later.
- Link airport markers deliberately. The link is a statement that this is the national airport, not merely an airfield drawn nearby.
Common misconceptions
“I can reclaim, then reclaim a share of that”
The budget is a share of natural land, so reclaimed ground never widens it. It does not compound.
“Adding water uses my green allowance”
Water is terrain and consumes no capacity at all. Parks and plazas do.
“Place names are city decoration”
They share a namespace with the national map. Naming a bay in the city names it for the country.
“I should be able to flatten this hill”
Elevation and vegetation are derived from the national terrain and are not editable. What you can change is the water's edge.
The collection ends here
You now have the whole layer: what the nation grants you, how to read it, what to build, and the ground to build it on. The reference numbers behind the national side of the contract live in GDP, population and development.